


Little Boxes

by SkyHighDisco



Category: The Grand Tour (TV) RPF, Top Gear (UK) RPF
Genre: Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Jeremy Clarkson Needs A Hug, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:34:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29492907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkyHighDisco/pseuds/SkyHighDisco
Summary: Jeremy's nightmare is way too real. Richard completely understands.
Relationships: Jeremy Clarkson & Richard Hammond
Comments: 8
Kudos: 10





	Little Boxes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ymas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ymas/gifts).



> who said (not once): nightmares, talking in the dark, and perceptive Richard. And I love all those as well. But yeah, just because. No occasion. She's just awesome, as everyone in this fandom can attest to. I'm soft like that, couldn't help it. <3
> 
> Also, watching films with people purposefully isolating themselves from the world for three days for experiment's sake is just as unhealthy as it sounds. (Yeah, I'm looking at you, Vsauce).

_“Little boxes on the hillside  
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky  
Little boxes on the hillside  
(…)  
And they all look just the same.”_

Malvina Reynolds – “ _Little Boxes_ ” (1962.)

~

.

Tinnitus is a condition which manifests as the perception of noise or ringing in the ears. Basically the frequencies are captured when there are none.

Something similar is happening here, but Jeremy thinks it’s more outside of the physical spectre of… whatever this is.

Jeremy can’t remember how he got here or when. His earliest recollection is that he just suddenly started existing in this large white room. Nothing prior to this vast space has ever been affirmed in his brain.

There is no visual abnormality. No deformation, or filth, or dust, or mould, or scuffmarks. It’s frustrating because he has nothing to lash out on except himself. And that’s not gone well.

He knows it’s a room because there are walls even as he doesn’t see them. There is some three times seven meters of space before he hits the end. Ceiling, he doesn’t know; stretching on his toes, lifting his arm, wriggling the fingers, he only feels emptiness. Since the source of light is undetectable and could as well be coming from everywhere, there are no shadows and angles. Jeremy’s found that out the hard way.

Trying to find a way out took the first bit of his soul. There are no doors on either side. No wall caves or gives in, there is no hidden button or traitorous crevice.

Panic introduces itself. Mild at first because Jeremy thinks it’s just a part of his unpracticality. But when he circles the white space twenty times and still finds nothing, he begins cussing. On thirty he begins shouting and beating and calling out for help and to be let out. The walls don’t resonate. They are hard and thick, but don’t emit cold. It isn’t cold nor hot in this room. There is absolutely nothing but air and Jeremy.

On fifty he just keeps circling in silence and soft whimpers.

After a while — he honestly can’t tell how long — exhausted, he lays down on the hard floor and falls asleep, hoping to wake up to familiar softness and voices and loving faces.

But everything is just as it was before he fell asleep. He begins threatening.

Having no sense of time works strangely because it could’ve been minutes or hours, all the same, but at some point, his threats turn to pleas. He offers money, he has information, he knows things, knows people. Whatever they want, he will give.

But no response ever comes. It’s still just Jeremy and air.

His voice becomes too loud after a while. Too booming against his sensitive eardrums which respond to nothing but silence when his mouth is shut. So he stops talking.

Instead, Jeremy walks. He burns more calories by doing so in several hours (minutes? A whole afternoon? Days?) than he has his whole life. He walks from one long end to another. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Does a 180. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. He probably walks miles.

He sleeps for an undetermined amount of time. Wakes up. Screams until he has no voice left and tears that come out are silent. Walks. Falls asleep out of exhaustion. Wakes up. Repeats.

He wants his children. He wants to hear Emily’s voice, Finlo’s laughter, Katya quietly singing in the kitchen when she thinks nobody’s in vicinity. He wants Lisa by his side so they can have another day full of adventures on their farm. He wants to listen to James’s warm voice ramble about pencil sharpeners and Victorian poetry. He wants to have Richard standing on the other side of him, arms folded across his chest, grinning, listening, nodding, laughing, alive and well after so many years.

Sometimes Jeremy sees their shapes out of the corner of his eye, but when he looks directly, there is only pure whiteness. He hears vague voices calling out his name, too, but it’s usually while falling asleep or only just waking up. He saw James walking into the wall once, but when he ran to catch him, his nose painfully collided with the hard surface, sending him back on his arse.

He learns not to follow illusions after that, no matter how achingly he wishes to.

He only ever hears one thing — an unknown male baritone voice, a bit dry, like scraped from decades of smoking, coming from all around him, seeping through the bright walls and bouncing off of him, startling Jeremy out of his mind if there was anything left up to this point.

“ _Tick-tock. Tick… tock…_ ”

Jeremy reacts splendidly. He jumps and cowers to the nearest corner, looking around with tightened jaw and twisty eyeballs.

Nothing ever comes of it, though.

After fifth awakening (his only method of measuring time), Jeremy does push-ups.

Jeremy has never done a single push-up in his life.

Muskulfiber pain he gets distracts him from all other pains.

He goes back to walking then. Up and down. An involuntary prisoner. One, two three, four fiv—

The tip of his sneaker bends at the edge.

Jeremy frowns.

_Strange._

He turns around. One, two, three, four, fiv—

Wall, again.

Jeremy’s memories are pretty scattered by now. There are crowds of people around him, and yet he is still alone. Day and night are molten into one, like a multi-coloured candle dissolved into an ugly mush of wax when it’s burnt out.

But he distinctly remembers counting to seven before.

The next sleep he counts six. In two sleeps, five. In six, four.

Curiously, in new state of panic, Jeremy gets on his tiptoes and stretches his arm out.

He needn’t have to. His palm effortlessly rests against the ceiling fully.

Jeremy makes a strange sound. Sort of like a bark, or a cry. He isn’t sure himself. But it’s loud and makes him cover his ears again, begging himself to stop.

Each time he rests and dozes off, he counts less and less steps. Like the space is shrinking when he sleeps. Almost imperceptibly, but it does. It leads Jeremy to purposefully keeping himself awake as much as possible until his body can’t anymore and he passes out.

Pretty soon he couldn’t walk anymore. He could stretch his arms out on either side and his palms would rest flat against a pair of walls. His curls are brushing the ceiling. Air is closing in on him.

Jeremy learns what claustrophobia means when he begins shrieking and wailing and banging his head against the wall in an attempt to end it all. To drown out the fake voices and their malevolent instructions, false accusations and merciless pleas. He wants to pull his ears out, but he only manages to scratch him until they bleed. Jeremy leaves red marks on the walls and flips out at their beauty. Gnaws his index finger to the bone trying to draw as much blood as possible so he could paint the walls and admire his art and giggle like a child. If only to have a brief moment of delight.

The delight is suffocated when he is forced to kneel under the pressing weight of the little box he is reduced into. His back hurts and he is suffocating. He shoves his whole hand into his mouth to attempt to choke himself, but only manages to retch.

All the memories are mush now. They are intertwined and dissolved into the mass of unrecognition and faces are blurry, voices wobbly and muffled and they are all one void. The walls, red, are the only derivative of reality that perhaps once existed, only Jeremy can’t tell. Maybe it has, maybe it hasn’t. Perhaps there were more people like him. The walkers, who paint in red and sing until they lose their voice and cry. Who fantasize and conjure up different worlds outside of their little white box.

The walls begin to hurt and Jeremy wails. He’s forgotten how to speak at this point, and only remembers how to make noises. His face is mushed against the floor and the screaming is muffled, and the pressure from above crushes his skull until everything is splattered with artistic red.

* * *

And then his eyes are open. He’s ripped out of one reality and spat into a different one, where air is chilly and the moisture around his eyes and sweat under his nose are rapidly cooling. Where the sounds of crickets and frogs, occasional owls and ripples of water surface replace the tinnitus-conjuring silence.

Jeremy inhales sharply and exhales heavily. Repeats it. The coldness is sharp and surprises his brain when it surges through his airways and he shudders. The sharp motion is followed by loud rustling and Jeremy realizes he is enveloped in this light, shiny material, cocooned around most of him and only revealing his chest to the night.

Night sky, partially obscured by clouds. Forest-surrounded lake. James to his right, back to Jeremy, snoring in obnoxiously ignorant bliss to what Jeremy has just been through.

On the left, a smaller figure stirs in his sleeping bag.

“What’s going on?” croaks Richard softly, lifting his head, eyes squinting and swollen from sleep just abandoned. “Are you alright?”

The voice works like a signal to Jeremy’s stiff motorics. He sits up so suddenly that he has to clamp his teeth firmly against each other to stop the rising sick from rocketing out of him. In swirling tempest of perception, Jeremy manages to arrange the Tetris blocks into place.

He isn’t trapped in a shapeless room. He’s out in the open. In Seven Lakes Valley, Triglav National Park in Slovenia, 1000 miles away from home. Surrounded by grass, the stationary water, the trees, the mountains, the stars, and all gifts of nature. They don’t imprison him, they teach him how to be free.

“Mate”, calls Richard in a low, quiet voice, reaching over with a heavy, but hesitant hand. The reach is barely enough so the tips of his fingers touch the flatness of Jeremy’s upper arm. “You’re sweating. It isn’t that warm.”

Jeremy doesn’t respond. He clamps a palm across his mouth, closes his eyes and begins to breathe deeply through his nose, concentrating to count each individual inhale and exhale and giving them all attention he usually wouldn’t acknowledge in involuntary biorhythm. He concentrates to steady the vibrating earthquakes that rattle his brain against the insides of his skull. The sort of vibrations he would in a positive sense feel in a rumbling supercar.

Richard could easily press him with questions. But somehow, he knows when not to. He knows exactly when not to be loud and obnoxious and fidgety and hot and bothered. He is calm and focused now and he sees things with those big eyes of his that Jeremy is unsure exactly how much. How much he knows but doesn’t tell. How much Jeremy is thankful after mics are turned off and private walls are lifted.

And he is just so good that he immediately understands Jeremy’s distress isn’t of nature of being only physically unwell.

It wouldn’t be the first time. Jeremy just needs a second. Something Richard will so unselfishly give him. Always. All the time in the world.

Richard doesn’t ask, but his soothing voice joins the chorus of background crickets and frogs. “It’s alright, mate. It’ll be alright.” The tips of the fingers on Jeremy’s arm gently begin to caress. Not far, not overmuchly, just for Jeremy to feel his presence with almost all senses. All that he needs.

“Do you want water? Yes?”

Even as sick is retracting back down to his stomach, Jeremy still doesn’t trust it enough to speak. He nods.

Richard leans on one elbow and the sleeping bag rustles in response. Jeremy soaks in every sound like a sponge. The rustle of fabric, grunts and clearing of throat, sniffs, sounds of life Richard produces, crackles of plastic and unscrewing of the cap and then there is moist coolness pressed into his hands.

Jeremy takes a careful sip. The beauty of water makes him dizzy. His fingers are cold and they hurt when tasked with a labour to keep a hold of the bottle. Drops of liquid freshness escape his lips and leak down his chin due to the shivers his fingers feel the need to drive out.

The other fingers are still there on his arm like a root keeping him stable. They are so calm compared to every agitated nerve under Jeremy’s skin and he lets them absorb the shakes so they can flow through the fingers and disappear into the ground.

Richard sits up when the bottle is offered back and unhesitantly takes a short swig himself, then screws the cap back on, watching Jeremy rub his face with both hands.

“Want to tell me?” he gently suggests, leaving the bottle back aside.

Jeremy doesn’t answer. Sits there and looks ahead and just breathes. And Richard takes it and doesn’t ask again. But he feels it wouldn’t be right to lie back down and fall back asleep, either. Rarely does he see Jeremy in this state. And as for nightmares, he isn’t big of a sufferer. Heavens know Richard is much worse for wear. Hasn’t always been like that, but brain damage has its way of thinning the line between reality and whatever its alternative.

But on occasion where whatever fear Jeremy’s unconsciousness has to conjure up gets to him, he will do his best to hide it.

Richard can barely count on fingers of one hand the times he’s seen his big friend this openly disturbed with no walls to defend himself with against the outside world.

No. Falling back asleep definitely wouldn’t do.

“It’s all alright, mate”, he speaks again, just as gently, trying to verbally soothe Jeremy. “It’s fine. We are all fine. James is there snoring, I’m here talking to you, Andy and the others are in that old wooden cottage there like normal people because you wanted to sleep in fresh air and us two followed you for some reason, your kids are fine and you will send them more pictures tomorrow and you will call Lisa and politely let her know what she’s missing out on again. Everything is alright.”

During Richard’s little monologue, where each word slips off his tongue without thinking, his hand had found Jeremy again, rubbing his broad back until the shivers finally subdue completely after a few minutes during which Jeremy hadn’t given Richard a single look.

But eventually Jeremy shifts to lay back down when leftovers of nightmarish sweat begin to cool and he tucks himself further into the sleeping bag. Richard follows suit, feeling fatigue creep back in. They turn out to be laying on their sides, facing each other and Richard sees Jeremy biting his lower lip, searching Richard’s eyes, and the younger man realizes he’s going to have to endure for just a bit longer.

“Do you”, Jeremy swallows and tries again. “Do you ever… notice things?”

Richard could decide to mock him then and there, Jeremy knows and expects so. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t even sarcastically ask him to elaborate. Richard looks serious. Honest. “Like what?”

“The small things”, Jeremy explains. He notices how he speaks a bit higher and dryer than what his low, private voice would usually be. “Your girls, your parents, your house, the drinkable tap water, the heating so you don’t freeze your plums off in the winter, the comfortable armchair by the fire, that one fucking tree you lean on when you have a breather on your morning run.”

Richard looks back at him a bit sadly. “You know that I do.”

Jeremy’s eyes turn remorseful, perhaps even a mixture of horrified, apologetic and shameful. Then they sink lower somewhere through Richard’s chest, far away. They are suddenly filled with inconsolable sorrow. “I want to do it more often. But we just… can’t help but take everything for granted, can we?”

Richard sighs. “Jez… Don’t think you’re the first or last one who’s made the same mistake. It’s an engraved fault people do every day. Like breathing. Which is another point on the matter you mentioned. But that doesn’t make you unappreciative, I promise you.”

“I’m so afraid I will lose it all”, admits Jeremy. His voice is almost shamefully low and quiet. “And not be able to go back again. And say that I’m sorry.”

Richard doesn’t need the concept of what Jeremy might imply. But he understands perfectly well what it means and what he has to say.

“In hospital”, he begins hesitantly, shifting a bit, not wanting to trigger Jeremy — which was ridiculous, since he is the only one who should be triggered by all means and medical records and written and recorded proof. “They… they were the only thing I could think about. My girls. And family and friends and the crew. Andy… James… You… How close I was to losing all of that. There was so much that could’ve gone worse. And it didn’t. Thinking about it was driving me mad until I realized the more I thought about it, the more fuel to the fire I was adding and it would eventually destroy me. Until I sort of twisted it around. Started being grateful instead of letting guilt and the what-ifs gnaw me to hysteria.

Sometimes things happen that make you realize the matter or appreciating small things, which aren’t small at all, as it turns out. But they don’t _have_ to. Understanding it yourself is even better.”

From Jeremy’s gaze, Richard knows the older man has soaked in every word. Not just that, but the way his face slowly begins to shift, wrinkle by appearing wrinkle, until there are tears to be stopped from being unleashed and Jeremy has to look away, but it’s unimportant Richard even if they flow. It only means all the more that he’s succeeded. And that’s much more than he could ask for.

Eventually, Jeremy’s eyes rise back up against Richard’s once tears are successfully drawn back and they shine with desperate significance. “You know that I… that I… _that_ …. no matter what happens, don’t you? You and that atavistic snoring machine over there.”

A significance Richard takes with a soft smile and warm eyes. “I know. We too, you. I thought we made it clear many times already. Don’t ever worry about it.”

Jeremy warmly smiles. Finally. It’s not enough to him, though, so before he can think too much about his next action, he takes Richard’s hand and pulls it forward to kiss the back of it before closing his eyes. “Thank you.”

“Sleep, you stupid twat”, instructs Richard huskily and gently. His fingers grip the bracelets and beads and dig through them until they touch Jeremy’s warm skin where they lastly rest as he is already falling back asleep.

And Jeremy feels fastened to reality and a lot less afraid he’d float off into some inconceivable trap of his dreams.

On the other side, enveloped by weavings of sleep of his own, James turns around and fidgets and mumbles restlessly, frown wrinkling his forehead. His hand stretches out and the tips of his fingers reach about until they find Jeremy’s back. The frown immediately relaxes back down and the incomprehensible noises are replaced by a soft hum of comfort. The deep, raspy half-snoring, half-breathing continues as normal.

Jeremy smiles.


End file.
